


concerning lambs

by ninemoons42



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Betrayal of Trust, Blunt Weapons, Broken Bones, Butcher Work, Cannibalism, Character Study, Confessions, Cooking, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Crying, Dark Charles, Dissection, Dissonant Serenity, Driving, Emotional Manipulation, Eureka Moment, Exhaustion, Fear, Food Gorn, Food Porn, Gen, Kitchen Prep, Maiming, Mutilation, Nightmares, Organ Meats, PTSD, Protectiveness, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Revenge, Running Away, Sensory Distortion, Shock, Sketches, Sleep Deprivation, Sleeplessness, Teaching, Temporary Hearing Loss, fistfights, morgues, run erik run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-13 05:59:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 9,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FBI Special Investigator Erik Lehnsherr's unique genius as a profiler consists of being able to see precisely how criminals and serial killers think, but his condition is starting to kill him - and it's certainly got him blinded to the murderer right under his nose.</p><p>Or, rather, the cannibal with whom he's taken refuge: Dr Charles Xavier. Noted psychiatrist, former surgeon, and a dab hand with the culinary arts - and also the Chesapeake Ripper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. medium rare

**Author's Note:**

> My version of Hannibal Lecter is really about equal parts the original canonical depiction of him in the first two novels [Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs] and the current character as beautifully played by Mads Mikkelsen.
> 
> [There'll be more of this. The idea of Charles drawing Wound Man and cracking ribs just hits way too many of my kinks for me to leave it alone.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original inspiration taken from [this gifset](http://ninemoons42-five-sentences.tumblr.com/post/51490640263/ninemoons42-writes-medium-rare-the-house-is-cool). This was a five-sentences ficlet, hence the punctuation and stream-of-consciousness style.

The house is cool and it settles around him, corners creaking in the drafty night - but then, that is what he is swathed in his layers for - Dr Charles Xavier takes no chances, however, and he meticulously reknots the tie on his robe before he faces the sudden blast of icy air coming from his refrigerator; it’s the best-quality appliance he can find, which is just as well considering how _perishable_ his consumables can be: fruits and vegetables and organic free-range eggs and full-cream milk and all that marbled red, and he smiles when he turns away to regard his guest: “A midnight snack, Erik?”

“I’ll have indigestion if I eat and I’ll fall down dead if I don’t,” Erik says, and if his voice trembles around the whispers that seem to come straight from the all-too-shaken depths of his soul Charles very kindly does not show any outward reaction - though inside he savors the fear that comes off Erik in waves, the sweet desperation, like capered salt delicately sprinkled into a handmade hollandaise sauce - “And, and,” Erik continues, “I don’t want to think, and I only want to feel.”

“Food can provide feeling,” Charles murmurs, and he doesn’t hesitate when he selects the short ribs - Jacob’s ladder, and the irony is not lost on him considering who is waiting to be fed, perhaps not so patiently, on the other side of the kitchen island - nor does he slow down as he carefully butterflies the meat off the bones, soft shrieking song of his knife moving through the succulent flesh, so reminiscent of the sharp saw he’d used to obtain the cut in the first place - “You will not need to wait long for this,” Charles says, and heats his skillet to red-hot.

Erik twitches and looks everywhere, and Charles knows the man is looking at his hands as he goes about his tasks: large onions, sliced and peeled to be rapidly charred and sweetened in the transcendent heat; tomatoes rid of the seeds and the juice, dressed with balsamic - and then the bread, crusty and speckled with poppy seed; he murmurs, “Condiments if you want to help, they’re on the rack next to you,” and he in turn watches Erik’s movements, still jerking with the double pain of adrenaline comedown and shock.

“Looks good,” Erik says, and he pushes his glasses up his nose and reaches, perhaps a little too eagerly, for the first plate of beautifully seared beef, sweet savory earthy smoke lingering in the interstices between the two of them, and Charles eyes his wrists and hands and his too-broad but too-thin shoulders, and thinks about coaxing feeling and flavor into him, thinks about the blood pooling just beneath the skin, insistent life, painful and galling and tangy on the tongue like a well-made _agrodolce_ sauce, and he smiles a secretive little smile and picks up his knife so he can taste the meat on his plate.


	2. shiver

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I only know the name of one of Will Graham's dogs, I've made up the others mentioned here.

The house swims out at him from the close damp, from the constant fog, and Erik’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, once, twice.

A moonless night, starless. The darkness hangs too closely around him, as though fastened to the bones in his shoulders, bearing him down, holding him fast to the ground. Immobile.

Erik cannot be immobile, or his thoughts will catch up with him.

Home, he thinks, casting his exhaustion out like a fraying net. Home, where he covers his pillows and his sheets with towels, and runs an extra load of laundry every morning. Home, where the dogs can be relied on to tear up the furniture, but will not approach his worktable. Home, where the piles of paperwork that Jack foists on him are gruesome enough that it turns his stomach when he has to write them up into a lecture for his next class. 

If he can even teach that next class. He might well have to give up on the course. Too many days spent running after the dead. Too many nights chasing killers into every dark crack and crevice inside his own mind. How does anyone put up with him? How is it that he hasn’t been locked up himself?

How is it that Jack continues to drive him and needle him and push him so close to the abyss?

Is he _letting_ Jack push him?

He smells grass and wet leaf and fallen feathers as he shifts into neutral. It takes him two tries to park the car properly. He’s tired and hungry and he doesn’t want to sleep, can’t think about eating.

The dogs, he has to think of the dogs. They are safe, to him. He can touch them and they will remain dogs, they will not be warped into strange nightmares. Winston and Meggie and all of the others, fog-heavy fur and lint-wrapped paws, and he thinks he can try to smile for them. They wag their tails at him.

Meggie struggles the most in the bath, and Winston whimpers happily when Erik trains the hairdryer on him, and Sasha and Stitch snap playfully at each other’s tails. It makes him laugh, but he doesn’t laugh for long, because the sound is explosive and startling and it’s not like him at all. A desperate laugh, no mirth in it, only the fruitless search for a distraction. 

Case after case, corpse after corpse. His dreams are soaked in blood and ichor. His hands shake when he cleans his glasses on the tails of the tattered, baggy t-shirt he wears to sleep.

An extra finger of whiskey. The tumbler clatters when he puts it down on his nightstand. 

He thinks about calling Dr Xavier. Perhaps they could move up one of their - conversations. 

Those icy blue eyes, too calm and too calculating to be trusted, are the last thing Erik sees before he slides reluctantly into sleep.


	3. whetstone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lest we forget that this is a story that involves an *experienced* killer, here is Charles and his version of kitchen prep.

The knife goes into the man’s heart with just the barest hint of resistance, and then the blade slides home - in and in and in - and Charles takes a deep breath of the snowy night and of its myriad scents, takes in the harsh sweetness of spilled metal, spilled scarlet: burrs in his teeth, heaviness on his tongue.

The road before him is empty, and the road ahead will soon be clogged in the mists of dusk.

Home by sunset, he thinks - not exactly an impossible goal, not if he drives quickly, and he has a network of deserted roads to take, so he’ll have the pleasure of that solitary flight. Still, best not to keep Alana waiting - she’ll want to eat. More to the point, she’ll want to help cook. He has to have procured his ingredients by then.

As he lays the man out on the hard-packed snow Charles thinks carefully about the contents of his larder. Shallots and garlic and greens. He cuts through the flesh - rapid, precise movements, not a stroke wasted. Through the torso and around the stomach. A quick inspection with the fingertips - he raises his eyebrows. It could be acceptable. 

Charles doesn’t have to glance at the cooler in the footwell of the front passenger seat to make his decision: he’ll take the stomach now. Better to be ready. He can distract himself with something else as he goes through the process of purging the stomach of its contents later on. Music, or a good book read well. 

Unexpected bonuses. The thought makes him smile and lick his lips thoughtfully.

Here is the first kidney; he makes a delicate cut through the fat surrounding the organ, carefully and rapidly looks it over for blemishes. Dark red, almost maroon and almost brown in some places. Fresh and delicate, and the blood is still steaming. He nods, satisfied, and takes the other kidney. The movement of his knife is assured and almost leisurely: muscle and sinew yield readily.

When he’s done, Charles zips the corpse back up into its layers of flannel and denim, and for a moment he thinks of Erik who dresses to be inconspicuous and normal, for a given value of _normal_ \- and he laughs because the very idea is ludicrous. Erik is six feet tall and towers easily even over Jack Crawford, never mind Alana Bloom or Abigail Hobbs or, yes, Charles Xavier himself. He is tall, and he hunches over himself to try and look smaller, but the posture only draws attention to his shoulders and to the gun in its holster at his waist, and he cannot be small or normal or ordinary. 

His sight is a gift and a challenge and a treat, and Charles wants him around, because Erik might suffer from those little gaucheries of his, but he is also so interesting, all sharp edges and desperation, and he must be cultivated until it is time for him to be judged and reaped and taken in.

After another few minutes Charles drives away, and there is a body on the side of the road that has had its eyes carefully closed and its jackets done up - and it’s no longer human. 

Perhaps it might never have been one to begin with.

Callas on the radio, soaring great notes and the basest of emotions, and Charles hums along and keeps perfect pace with the leaping cadences, and he thinks about wilting some greens and tossing them with peeled orange segments, thinks about sauteed shallots and clarified butter, thinks about the sizzle of blood on his grill.

Alana smiles at him, brightly, when he opens the door to her in her sharp scarlet scarf, and he nods in approval when she washes her hands with precise little movements. Perhaps she’ll drink a rose tonight, perhaps she’ll ask for one of the other beers. He passes her a knife and a Warsteiner beer glass, and nods with pleasure when she smacks her lips over the beer head.

For himself he pours a red Chianti Classico, rich cherry notes exploding on his tongue, and he thinks of inviting Erik over for dinner. 

Would he eat haggis?


	4. dissolution

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: death by penetration with a blunt object, and also at least one jump scare by telephone.
> 
> The case under consideration here is of my own invention, and does not come from the TV show.

Erik can hear the scuff of his own feet dragging over the tiles, and the tiles are pristine now where there had been blood in a discernible trail not six hours ago. A straight path, the drops placed close together - steady flow at a quicker speed than just walking. The man’s corpse had still been bleeding, though Erik knows that has more to do with being found alive and getting put on life support. There wasn’t much that could be done, and he knows that, because he’d been standing over the body when the man blinked for the last time and flatlined.

Katz and the others are gone, and night falls closer and more deeply around the offices of the Behavioral Science Unit, and he doesn’t want to be here. Nor does he want to be alone.

Here is the morgue and here are the tables. Everything is clean, for now. The sharp scent of cleaning solutions makes him wince, makes him press his fingertips to his temples. Shallow breaths. 

There is no blood in here, no leaking plasma. The stench of death and of its indignities have been scoured away, and Erik knows that the smell comes back - it always does, and it always seems so stronger every time they wheel a body in. As if the new victims bring the old with them, riding at the feet of the gurneys, transported together in the body bags and the shrouds labeled EVIDENCE. 

He wraps his arms around himself, and he’s still shivering when he closes his eyes.

Obligingly, his mind reconstructs the death for him: heart and lungs and liver and stomach, each run through with a pointed, prong-shaped baton, octagonal in cross-section. Each baton with two side-guards pointing in opposite directions, front and back from the perspective of the hand holding on to the weapon. 

He remembers seeing that flash of recognition in Katz’s eyes as they stared at each other over the newly dead, remembers her explaining to Jack and the others: the name of the weapon. _Sai_ : bludgeons, defensive weapons, used in Okinawa and modified into the Japanese _jitte_. The blunt tips of the shafts would have made the penetrating strikes even more painful. His mind supplies him with the idea of the amount of force that would be required to stab someone with a blunt weapon. 

Both _sai_ and _jitte_ have associations with law enforcement: police weapons, used primarily for defense, with the side-guards used to capture an assailant’s blade and turn that killing strike aside.

Erik, shivering, thinks about judgement: because that’s what killed the man. Judged and found wanting. The killer believes that his victims have committed _some_ kind of crime, but what sort of judgement is it that requires this kind of excruciating death? 

Despite himself he moves, assumes a striking position: feet apart, body coiled and tense, muscles moving from hip to shoulder and down to wrist, the force required to make the first strike and the momentum that makes it possible for the _sai_ to punch through the skin. Savagery and precision in concert: each weapon hitting its intended target in one stroke. 

He can feel the blood pouring out, one hand getting red and wet and then the other. Handedness: the killer had been carrying _sai_ in each hand, and two of the strikes completely perforated the targeted organ: the right lung and the right side of the stomach. They have to look for someone left-handed.

And then he comes up for air, never noticing he’s gone down on his knees next to one of the autopsy tables, and this time he takes the smell of the disinfectants in when he gulps loudly, breathing hard, not enough oxygen, not enough anger in the world - anger he wants to turn on something, on _someone_ , judgement - 

His phone rings.

Erik cries out and the echoes grip his heart, squeezing, iron bands, and he’s still halfway to shocked when he claws for his phone and whispers into it: “Who’s there?”

“Erik. You don’t sound well. Are you all right?”

It’s Charles. Erik is not reassured by that cultured, studied voice, resonant though it may be with invitation.

“I’m fine,” he says brusquely, and hangs up without another word.

The phone rings again.

“If you wish to have a conversation about it, you may find me at home,” Charles says, and this time he hangs up on Erik.

His mind, still reeling, blasts _yes_ and _no_ and he runs for the doors, for the outside world, and nearly drops his car keys several times, not knowing where he’s going.


	5. wash away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little spoilery for the end of Hannibal Ep09, so please be warned.

He can see the fine tremors running through Abigail Hobbs’s hands, and for a moment, he thinks he might have to start worrying about the safety of the wineglasses that she’s drying - her knuckles shivering against the cut crystal rims.

When he turns back around, however, she’s putting down both the tea towel and the glass with exaggerated care - before she pushes away from the island and wraps her arms around herself. She rocks from side to side, minute movements, and the fact that she doesn’t look comforted at all is what draws him in, is what makes him fold his own towel away neatly and step away from his own task of drying the last of the serving dishes.

“I helped him,” she says, at last, and the tears that track down her cheeks are crystalline and clear, carving wet paths over her freckles, down to the scar at her throat.

Charles has seen her cover that scar up with one artfully knotted scarf or another, and now he knows that she doesn’t hide it in company she trusts, and it is very unusual that she thinks Freddie Lounds could be counted among that group when rightfully it only ought to include himself and Erik. Perhaps Alana, as well, though that one tries to keep things strictly professional - and Charles knows she cannot and will not succeed. She is as invested in Abigail as they all are, even Miss Lounds in her mercenary aspect.

In her torment, Abigail is at once revealed and concealed: for her words, of course, are the secret that she has been hiding from everyone. 

“I was wondering when you’d tell me,” Charles murmurs. He knows about human fragility, about the jagged edges of other people’s grief, and in his heart of hearts he savors this girl’s anguish as though it were a counterpoint to the fine wine he’s been drinking all evening. 

“Of course you knew,” Abigail counters, and if she sounds bitter she also sounds relieved, though Charles is certain that he is the only person who can hear that perfectly hidden grace note, the barest music of her sobs. “Were you planning to tell me what I already knew?”

“I would never dream of hurting you that way.”

“I’ve been hurt enough. I’ve hurt enough people - I’ve _killed_ \- ” The words fail and falter.

Charles is at her side, and he gathers her in, tucking her under his chin. She bends, a little, fitting herself to him, and she clutches at him, tightly, crumpling his waistcoat. He lets her, this once. 

Abigail cries tidily, in contained little bursts. A few tears fall onto Charles’s starched collar. He can appreciate the performance of her, and he can appreciate the emotions at the same time, and he encourages her: he murmurs soothing nonsense into her hair, rubs a comforting spiral into the tense knot between her shoulder blades.

“I’m broken, I’m evil,” Abigail whispers as soon as the sobs taper off. Perfect, Charles thinks, she has perfect timing. “And everyone knows - ”

That’s _his_ cue, and Charles smiles and presses his lips to Abigail’s temple, pleased to play his part. “No one knows,” he whispers. “No one knows. Just you and me.”

“I’m nothing,” she says, “just daddy’s little monster - ”

“Not a monster, Abigail,” he says, and he shifts to hold her at arm’s-length, shifts so he can look her right in the eyes, so she can see the compassion he slips over the lines in his face. “You are not a monster. I know what monsters are like.”

“What are they like, Charles?”

“They don’t look like you,” he says, a lie that comes easily to his lips. He does know what she looks like, after all - the tense glitter that comes into her eyes is the same glitter he’d seen when she turned to him with Nicholas Boyle’s blood still freshly red on her hands, on her knife. “The monsters are not here. You were manipulated, Abigail.” And he could almost admire Garrett Jacob Hobbs for the subtlety of it: a near-perfect destruction of his own flesh and blood. A masterful subversion of Abigail’s trust.

“You’re a victim,” Charles tells Abigail, and if she breaks into fresh sobs at that the light in her eyes also goes hard, and he smiles at her, then. There is an understanding between them and it sets in deeper with every movement. “Now I will take care of you - and Erik will protect you. I promise.”

There’s more than that, though, and they both know it. 

Abigail is the knife he will hold at Erik’s throat.


	6. gunshot residue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The events of this chapter take their cue from the climax of Ep08, but this is not a rehash of that case.

The world jitters and streaks past Erik in strange sparking scenes, like seconds trickling past his fingers, cold slow flow.

Midnight’s sounds and midnight’s silence, lights flashing movement and time at him. The pavement beneath his feet, icy and slushy, salt on his battered boots, snowflakes melting into puddles and reaching together. The cold wind that beats at his layers of shirts - he’s missing his jacket, he’s left it behind in the killer’s basement - and the gun freezing in his hand, leeching away the heat that he cannot even generate, the heat that escapes his lips with every breath.

His ears are still ringing. Finger on the trigger, spasmodic squeeze, not even knowing if he’d pointed it in the right direction - the deafening roar splashing wetness onto his ear, his shoulder, liquid running into his collars and turning to ice in his hair. The world’s noise is nonexistent for him, his footsteps pounding desperately on the city streets.

In his other hand he’s holding a walkie-talkie and he can feel it squawking at him from half-numbed fingers. He can’t hear the questions being thrown at him like synchronized crossfire, doesn’t know if there are already familiar voices mixed into the din - so all he can do is say the words over and over: the place where he’d found the killer. “Officer down. Officer down.” 

Erik thinks he might be crying as he runs. Who for, he doesn’t know. The victims of the killer he’s pursuing, their bones stripped of flesh and cartilage and fat and meticulously carved into hairbrushes and mirrors? Himself? Charles Xavier?

Charles. _Oh._

And Erik realizes that he knows the street and knows the houses he’s running past: he’s following the familiar path to Charles’s office. He can see the lights burning in the windows now - and he can see the shadows crashing together, silhouettes tumbling through the curtains.

He shouts into the walkie-talkie, though he can just barely make out his own words, distorted further by the adrenaline rush: “Send units to downtown, Dr Xavier’s office - he’s being attacked - ”

His eyes on the windows. A smaller shape and a larger, twisting together, flinging each other about. Erik imagines the crash and splinter of fine wood. Things falling down, the armchairs and the chaise longue shattering.

The first real sound he hears isn’t the crash that he makes when he finishes off what’s left of the front door, which is already hanging crazily from one hinge when he barrels through. It’s not even the boom of the warning shot that he fires into the far wall - even his addled senses, his unsteady mind, can warn him not to fire towards the books lining the upper deck of the room. 

It’s the scream that the killer makes when Charles _throws_ him towards the ladder and then yanks one flailing arm through the space between two of the rungs, applying just a little more pressure to the overstressed elbow and shattering both the killer’s radius and ulna in one stroke.

One more injury to add to the fact that Erik has actually managed to shoot through the killer’s ear.

It’s the kind of scream that freezes Erik thoroughly, from his cold feet to his icy hands to the blood that’s already drained out of his face.

In that moment, time slows, sickeningly, when it had been flashing past in too-rapid intervals, and Erik knows he’s taking in the whole scene even as he can’t believe it, even as he can’t make heads or tails of it.

Charles in a black three-piece suit, the pale green pinstriping too bright, and the scarlet of his shirt and tie too dark. Blood running from his mouth, dark red smeared over dark red, two contrasting shades. Dark hair falling into haphazard curls, with the light catching on the gray strands at his temples.

His eyes are blank and icy blue - until he blinks and then murmurs, “Erik. Hello. He’s all yours.”

“Charles,” Erik hears himself say. “Are you hurt?”

Charles shakes his head, minutely - and then the police and the FBI break in, just as he manages to sit down, hard, on the end of the chaise.

Jack Crawford _leaps_ onto the killer and is none too gentle in cuffing him, and Erik has to shake his head to clear away the echoes of those pained screams.

Charles, of course, is as perceptive as ever. “I see - he got away from you somehow. But he was slow, injured, reeling. That did not stop him from putting up a fight.”

“I’m not sure you won,” Erik says, honestly.

A quiet, weary-sounding chuckle. “I was not trained to be a prizefighter, after all. I was only just lucky. But now you’ll be able to extract some useful information, perhaps.”

“How did he know to come here - ”

“I do not know.”

Erik hangs his head for a moment. “Pulled you into my world. Not something that should have happened.”

He gets another smile for that, a little worn, a little too sharp and strange around the edges, a little knowing. “I appreciate the sentiment, and the company, but I rather crossed over under my own power, don’t you think.”

Erik winces when he sits down.

Next to him, Charles is cold and rigid and distant.


	7. country road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part has a mostly original case that actually doubles as a shout-out to one of the original crime scenes in the novel Red Dragon, and as a consequence references Ep01 of the TV show.

There is pleasure like biting into a perfectly black, perfectly ripe muscat grape and licking up the juices before they can run down towards his collar and leave dark shadowed stains, and there is pleasure like putting on a set of beautifully crafted leather gloves - cracked and napped in the right places, the hallmarks of being used well and used often - to drive down a country lane, underneath an uncertain dawn, beneath night-glowing clouds and the distant stars.

It’s different when Charles drives by himself, and it’s different when he drives with a passenger.

This passenger is alive. His shallow rapid breathing is both a familiar sound and a new one. 

Erik slouches into the passenger seat - which has been pushed well back from the dashboard - and is doing his very best to seem small and unthreatening and inconspicuous. Head tipped well forward, his chin touching his breastbone with every heaving breath. He is not wearing gloves; his hands are shoved into his pockets, and Charles can see those workmanlike fingers moving, twitching spasmodically, and he guesses that Erik is suffering from equal parts crash and cold.

Police lights and Jack Crawford in their wake: a crime scene, a man and his lover and his children composed to look as if they were all sleeping together in a comfortable pile, holding hands in a nest of comforters and blankets.

Except that the two men, the parents, have been castrated and their eyes put out, and they and the children have been killed with precisely placed gunshots to the neck or to the head.

Charles had been listening to the crime scene techs, to Jack’s entourage, talking about “trying to run away” and “no casings, every single one was collected” and “an entire safe full of ammunition”, and he’d hummed thoughtfully as he followed Erik around at a discreet distance, tracing the invisible trail that connected all of the bloodstains, bedroom to bedroom and thence to the major crime scene itself.

At some point he finds himself standing calm and neutral behind Jack Crawford as Erik points out the spot where the killer had, presumably, lain down among his victims: indents in the carpet corresponding to hands and feet. The acuity of it, the unimaginable leaps of Erik’s logic, drawing perfect pictures from imperfect and conflicting evidence, fills Charles with a glee that he has to suppress, and savagely he bites at the inside of his cheek, drawing blood - another metallic taste layered onto the metallic scents in the air, the lingering fumes of cordite, the evaporating remnants of human life.

Now Erik is in his car, the same haunted expression as when he’d finally snapped out of his trance and started talking, laying out for his audience what seemed like the most obscene of cozy family photographs - as if he’d been put in that place for Charles’s delectation alone. He’s not speaking now, and he can’t seem to keep his eyes on the road. Charles savors the fear of him like a fine sweet wine, such as he’d serve with a torchon of foie gras and a lightly dressed green salad.

Still, he’s the voice of calm reason when he turns the radio down and rolls the windows up and says, quietly, “Do you want to talk about it, Erik?”

“I don’t know.” Pause. “Is there anything in the world that can make me forget that I saw that and _knew that_?” Erik’s jaw clicks on every other word. He keeps such a tight rein on himself. Too much control is not good for anyone. 

Charles knows when he has to lose control, and to that urge he gives himself up most gladly.

As for Erik, Charles wants him to put those reins to the sword, because he thinks that as beautiful and terrible that killer who left his macabre family portrait behind in a makeshift tableau might be, Erik would be so much _more_. He wants Erik unbalanced. He wants him to take that step over the knife-edge. Willingly, of course, if he can.

If not, Charles will give him a helping hand. Charles will lead him over. He knows his own abyss, has let it look back up into him. 

He wants Erik to do the same.

“There are other cases,” Erik says, suddenly. “Those gunshots. I’ve seen them before. The way the killer broke in. Too clean, too fast, as if he’d known exactly where to go and what to do, what the locks were, how to defeat the doors in his way.”

“Keep going,” Charles murmurs. “If it helps you to talk it out, by all means, do so. I will be delighted to serve as your sounding board.”

“First you compare yourself to a paddle, now you’re a board. I’m starting to think you might be trying to make me laugh.”

Charles chuckles: collected and calculated. “Why shouldn’t I try? I am supposed to be finding out what makes you tick. You come to me for conversation, therefore it is my task to make sure that that well does not run dry.”

Erik’s smile is forced, and there are too many lines around his eyes. He does it, anyway, and does not look at Charles, and that means Charles is free to observe him out of the corner of his eye. Observe his reactions when Charles turns up the heater - the nearly imperceptible tremble that tightens the wide shoulders and then releases them, leaving Erik almost relaxed. 

Very carefully, judging his words and his tone as best as he can, Charles says, “I don’t suppose you’d join me for breakfast. A few blueberries, an egg or two, some summer sausage.”

“Except for the blueberries, that’s almost what you brought me the first time we actually started talking to each other.” Erik blinks, slow, owlish. “I didn’t think you’d be one to repeat a meal.”

Insight, Charles thinks, and smiles around his flash of annoyance. “Of course I do,” he says. “There’d be no point in my attempts to recreate certain repasts I’ve had the good fortune to experience in the past, otherwise.”

“Such as?”

It’s not the question that he answers, the question that Erik tosses out, belligerently self-defensive - it’s the interest that sparks in those haunted eyes, a rare gift indeed. So Charles indulges him, and indulges himself, and talks about a three-star restaurant near Mantua. Of pasta sliced into ribbons with a heavy chef’s knife, the well-honed steel throwing flashes of light all around the kitchen, toward the pots and pans and the stoves at full heat. Of the all-female _brigade de cuisine_ , salt-and-pepper hair cut short or tied tightly back into buns or braids or some combination of both.

“I don’t travel much,” Erik says, after, and the smile is a little less forced. A little wistful.

“Jack Crawford keeps you on a tight leash,” Charles observes.

Erik’s lip curls, briefly, in a strange approximation of a sneer that is mostly a grimace.

Interesting. Charles files the reaction away for future reference. 

Earlier attempts to drive a wedge between Erik and Jack were fruitless; perhaps Charles can try another tack, now that he knows more about which of Jack’s buttons to push.

As for Erik, Charles knows something more about him, and knows which paths to make him take.

When they finally reach his house Charles opens the front door and waves Erik through, and murmurs “Gesundheit,” like an afterthought, when Erik sneezes and hurriedly apologizes after. “No matter,” he says. “Go and wash up, I’ll have breakfast ready in a moment.”

The look in Erik’s eyes when Charles places a full plate before him, when Charles pours the coffee, is the look of a man looking at a salvation that he knows he cannot have. He hides his smile behind his gold-rimmed cup, and savors the bitterness of the brew.


	8. howl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Erik might be getting a clue, or he might not be. This part references [dissolution](http://archiveofourown.org/works/820815/chapters/1561413) [Chapter 4].

He is dreaming, and he does not know how he knows this for certain.

He has never been a lucid dreamer: his gift, or his curse, prevents him from being able to direct the course of the nocturnal wanderings of his mind. It’s as if it wasn’t already enough that his mind is betraying him when he is awake - he hallucinates Abigail’s voice and Alana’s when he knows that he’s alone in a room; he hears footsteps that aren’t there but that make him brace himself for Jack’s presence or for Katz’s. 

Now in his dreams he can see a pack of wolves, hollering and howling and filling the darkness with unmistakable malice, with blood-red fangs.

In his dreams, Erik is running, and he can never tell whether he’s running away from the wolves or toward them. He doesn’t know if he wants to be consumed, to be taken in, to be trampled underfoot.

When he wakes he can always remember the feral expressions on feral faces. He can always remember massive paws pounding to the beat of his heart or pounding on his heart. He can always remember the grays and dapples of the wolves.

He can never remember their eyes - and he doesn’t know why he thinks he has to remember.

It’s Tuesday. He’s in class, for a wonder, and the sport coat he wears to deliver his lectures is both too flimsy and far too stifling at the same time - he sweats underneath the lights, underneath the collective gaze of his students. Their faces are wreathed in the lights of their screens: tablets, smart phones, laptop computers. Hardly a one among them uses pen and paper now. 

Erik stubbornly holds on to the cheap ballpoint in his hand and gestures at his slides with it, and he can hear his own voice, steady and decisive. The case under consideration is the one in which the killer had used _sai_. He remembers Katz telling him she’d looked things up, and that the particular weapon had had a _manji_ design: the left-facing swastika, used as a holy symbol in both Hinduism and Buddhism.

The details of the case are on the slides, and Erik does not need to look at the photographs of the bodies to remember: blunt force trauma, primarily left-handed gestures. The killer had been looking for revenge. She’d been assaulted and disfigured and left for dead - and she’d taken advantage of that. 

He knows, academically speaking, that it is nearly impossible to avoid feeling some kind of sympathy for this kind of criminal - and he can see flickers of that sympathy in the faces of his students.

Not so in the face of Dr Charles Xavier, though, who is standing in the door into the lecture hall: a trim silhouette in a trim suit, impeccable as always, and the only distinguishing feature of his shape is his hair, wind-tousled as always. There is an oddly appealing contrast between that dishevelment and the sharp lines of his jacket and trousers and waistcoat. He is carrying a coat in the crook of one arm.

It’s one of the few times that Erik has ever seen him wear glasses; the wavering light that casts the slides onto the wall, magnified, sparks and shatters off his steel or silver frames, off his lenses. Off the disinterested look in his eyes.

At the end of the lecture, Erik watches the trainees flow and weave around Charles’s unmoving form, and he wishes he could be more accommodating - the good doctor is technically his guest, here, after all, if Charles is here to see him - but the exhaustion never leaves him, nor the shivers that cling to him from his unsettled nightmares, and he can’t help but collapse in a little on himself.

“You put on quite a different face when you speak to your students,” Charles says as he approaches. “And your voice does not quite shake as much.”

“Still shakes,” Erik mutters, a little stubbornly. He shuffles and refuses to make eye contact. He takes his time putting his things away in his bag. “But I can forget they’re there,” he says, gesturing offhandedly toward the now-empty chairs. “And they aren’t allowed to speak in here. It’s my policy. I kick them out if they talk out of turn.”

“But since you do not stop to solicit questions from them, they do not speak.”

“I’m just here to tell them things. I’m under no obligation to listen if they want to tell me something. They can take it up with their actual supervisors.”

Charles chuckles, a quiet sound that still echoes softly around them as he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I came here to see Alana and afterwards she pointed me in your direction.”

“I thought you’d come to pick me up. I’m not supposed to be talking to you until after dinner.”

“Quite right,” Charles says. “Well, then, I’ll see you in a few hours. Were we not supposed to be talking about your dreams? I seem to remember that that was the question we left hanging, from the previous appointment.”

Erik freezes for a moment, and then - why not? He’s here, and Charles is here, and they are almost out the doors.

“Erik?” Charles asks. He turns around on the steps, caught in the act of putting his coat on.

The too-powerful reflections of light off the eyeglasses mean that Erik temporarily cannot see Charles’s eyes, which is partly a relief and partly a thing that drives fresh fear into Erik’s own runaway-rabbiting heart.

“I don’t suppose you could tell me what it means,” Erik says, slowly, “that I dream of predators and I don’t actually know whether I’m one of them or I’m their next meal.”

Slow, cool chuckle. 

It makes Erik think of, strangely, the steps of an approaching animal - the steps of an approaching wolf.

“I think,” Charles is saying, “that I will need to hear this story in full, before I can give you any counsel.”

There is too much tooth in Charles’s smile, and for a long moment, Erik stands on the steps, chilled. Reality bleeding into his subconscious, and he can’t tell where he is, or what this is.

That’s when he starts to fear Charles in earnest - he’d been uneasy before, he’s never been perfectly sanguine around the man, unlike Jack Crawford. Now he thinks of Charles and of the wolves running wild in his subconscious and thinks that they are one and the same.

He follows Charles, dragging his steps.


	9. scalpel-sharp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for a character giving serious and considered thought to the maiming and killing of another, as depicted in a [Wound Man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_Man) sketch.

He can hear the nib of his pen as he strokes it over the paper, as he writes up his latest set of case notes, and he is vain enough to take extra care with his handwriting. True that he keeps his own records sealed, true that it’ll take some serious legal contortions before _anyone_ can even begin to start reading his files, but Charles takes pleasure in the flow of the ink and in the curve of the downstroke and in the little flourishes he adds to certain letters. He knows the importance of a steady hand and he knows the importance of beautiful script, and his ledgers are full of precision and details, the perfectly formed letters spelling out secrets and problems and - inserted neatly into the margins - his own little solutions for the odd handful of particularly recalcitrant patients.

Once he’s done with his current patients he moves to another notebook: this one holds his observations on Jack Crawford and on the people associated with him. Bella does not come as frequently now; Charles has gathered that she is back at work, though Jack checks in with her as frequently as she does with him - mutual reassurances. Easy enough to understand, and something he’d counseled them to do in any case. It’s good to know Jack trusts him, and that Bella is willing to go along with some of his suggestions.

More leverage.

Of Jack’s forensic team, only the woman - Beverly Katz - commands Charles’s attention. Cool sharp mind behind cool sharp eyes; little escapes her when the evidence is presented to her, which means that she is very, very easy to stymie. All Charles has to do is leave no evidence. He’s had practice with that, and he knows how to use the environment to advantage. Fire is an old friend of his. He has his own _oubliettes_ , and he takes care to use them infrequently, and to scour them every time he must resort to them.

Alana Bloom - perhaps they might be due for another dinner, and he takes real pleasure from the fact that he now has an ironclad excuse to see her, to have her over for drinks. He remembers her asking him why they’d never had an affair, remembers his own nonchalant response - but he knows, too, that time is her ally and not his. Alana’s mind works in terms of meandering and eccentric flow, but eventually she gets down to brass tacks and truth - an advantage for her, and thankfully one she’s unaware of when it comes to him. 

He knows he’d have eventually placed himself in harm’s way if they’d pursued that relationship. Oh, they would have had fun, of that he has no doubt. But very little gets past her. He is not one of her blind spots, and he never will be.

The opposite can be said of Abigail Hobbs, and this is a fact that Charles is willing to admit, if only to himself. She is a blind spot that he is willing to cultivate. There are certain things that they have in common, and that is what makes him use her - and that will also mean that she could, eventually, learn how to use him. It’s a calculated risk. Besides, he’s curious: he wants to know what will lead her off the straight and narrow. There is a disposition in her that is only partly her father, the terrible waiting weight of a start of darkness. Charles wants to see her plunge into her own shade, and will encourage her to that end.

Speaking of darkness, he turns the page, and there is his own handwriting, and his notes on one Erik Lehnsherr. 

Charles smiles to himself, and goes to fetch his brandy, which has been waiting for him in its snifter, perched over a tealight, for the past few minutes. A reverent pause, a deep draught. He holds the rich heated strength of it on his tongue, and he closes his eyes for the final swallow, allowing the taste of it to sink into his senses.

His tongue is still heavy with potent flavors when he opens his eyes and reaches for his drawing tools. A scalpel, a fresh carbon pencil, a sheet of paper. Careful, precise stroke: blade against wood and a core of charcoal and graphite. The scent of cedar permeates his senses. 

With the pencil at its best point Charles closes his eyes and feels out the edges of the paper, and then he starts to draw from memory: broad shoulders, scarred hands, spectacles with scratched-up plastic frames. Strokes to hint at the near-permanent five-o’-clock shadow. A physical embodiment of empathy and tension, an anxiety that slices straight through to the bones.

After the outlines, after the framing device of the human form, come the details. 

Battle wounds, wounds from accidents, deliberate killing strokes. Charles draws in the injuries with careful, nearly obsessive attention to detail, and he resharpens the pencil where it’s necessary, the better to get shape and shade and substance right.

On the sheet of paper is Erik pierced and flayed and slashed, Erik battered, Erik made a corpse - except for the space between his eyes, which Charles has deliberately left clear and unmarked.

Then he cleans the black off his hands and presses a fingertip against the sketched-in ridge of Erik’s eyebrows, and he whispers, “For you I won’t need weapons, Erik. 

“Because I can kill you with my mind.”


	10. welcome to the bleeding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: a person butchered for meat, with certain parts and organs taken for later use.
> 
> Also, Erik finally gets that lightbulb lit over his head.

It’s not the crime scene itself that surprises Erik, though he supposes that it must be some kind of first for the others: Katz looks repulsed, while Price and Zeller just have identical blank looks on their faces. As for Jack Crawford, well, Erik’s seen past his poker face, and he knows what lurks behind that façade. Possibly only his pride is keeping him here; if he could, he’d probably have _run_.

So Erik gives them all a way out, a not-so-graceful way to save face. “Can you please leave me alone?”

Somebody tries, and fails, to suppress a case of the dry heaves as they file out. He puts them all out of his mind, though, and he stands up straight and takes it all in.

The floor beneath his feet is spotless tile, clean even before they got there. Not a drop of blood has been spilled, so there’s really no need for him to be wearing the paper overshoes, but the others follow procedure when there’s nothing else they can say or do, and so does he. 

Three of the walls are equally clean - they could almost be sparkling, Erik thinks, and when he inhales his mind obligingly supplies the acrid scent of an industrial-strength cleaning agent. The material won’t hold fingerprints. He knows that already. 

Besides, this killer is deadly meticulous. Any evidence they find will be on that person’s terms. These are easy things to accept. It’s not Erik’s job to look for fabric or determine the cause of death.

His job is to put himself in the killer’s mind, and somewhere he thinks he can hear the howling of the wolves.

He turns to the far end of the room: to the steel tables placed end to end. The killer wanted a surface to work on, bright lights, and time. There was at least one very sharp knife involved. Cleavers are used to dismember chickens and fish. To cut through the bones of something bigger - like a pig or a cow - saws are required. 

There are no blades here, just the corpse of a man, expertly cut up for meat and organs. The heart is missing, the lungs, the liver, the brain, the tongue. A fine specimen of human health, Erik thinks, if the killer saw fit to remove all of those organs from just the one body. One body laid out in thirteen pieces. Head, torso in quarters, arms separated from the body and cut in half at the elbow joint, legs likewise separated from the body and cut in half at the knees. Both of the upper chest sections are short several ribs, and most of the left thigh is missing as well.

When Erik thinks of the hands that could have performed this - a systematic and clean dissection, precise and methodical and efficient - his mind supplies him with the image of a physician in a lab coat. Sleeves splashed with gore. Latex gloves, overshoes, perhaps a shield to protect the eyes from bone fragments. A large cooler, perhaps two, for storage. 

This is a well-trained mind, one well used to this kind of work, so there would have been backups and contingency plans. What if this one had resisted? What if the anaesthetic agent had not worked, or produced an allergic reaction? Erik can almost, almost see the logic of it, and when he looks that darkness in its eyes he sees deep and cold darkness, almost blue, almost familiar.

The facts are adding up in his head, and he’s not surprised that they fall in line, relentless, cold.

What does surprise him is that he knows what - who - the answer is. 

And maybe, he thinks, as he coldly remembers accepting food from that answer’s hands, he’s known all along.

Eventually he goes back out to the others. 

“Who are we looking for? Is it - ”

Erik cuts Jack off with a quick gesture. “It is. It’s him. He’ll kill again, and soon.”

“How do we find him?”

“Someone who knows his way around a kitchen,” Erik says in a monotone. “Someone who’s very familiar with knives. All kinds of knives. He has refined tastes.”

“That could be anyone,” Katz says.

“It’s not just anyone,” Erik says, shaking his head. “Narrow the professions down. Used to be a medical doctor of some kind. Now knows far too much about cooking, about breaking meat down into its primal cuts.”

Jack suddenly freezes in the middle of barking orders into his mobile phone.

Erik meets his gaze coldly and evenly.

 _“Shit,”_ Jack says, and while the others are still staring at him Erik slips away, and he kicks his car into gear. He thinks he might have laid rubber in the parking lot in his haste to get away. He doesn’t care - he has to check on the others. Alana. Abigail.

Home can wait, he thinks, and he never sees the car that slides into position behind his, steady methodical pursuit.


	11. a linoleum knife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even the Wikipedia article for linoleum knives mentions the original Red Dragon novel, because apparently a lot of people remember that Will Graham was very nearly disemboweled by Dr Hannibal Lecter using that very implement. Here, Charles dishes out a very different [and ultimately very familiar] kind of damage, but it's still the same kind of knife.
> 
> Last chapter! The usual warnings apply, with special emphasis on both mental and physical suffering and some detailed references to the rest of the original Hannibal Lecter books.

Erik runs: he gasps for breath, and every breath burns. The stitch in his side is like wildfire, consuming his nerves, sapping him of the speed that he needs. Running - it used to be something familiar to him; he used to cover long distances without any pain, everything in him focused only on the rhythm of his feet on the trail or on the road. 

Now running will kill him, but it will make for an easier death than the one that is snapping at his heels.

How did he get here, Erik thinks, or makes himself think. With every desperate step he knows he’s inching towards the abyss, towards his own private hell or oblivion. He knows what panic is like when it’s more than just his teeth chattering and when it’s more than just the very real and very immediate threat of a blade hooking into him, and it clutches at him now and won’t let him go.

The car, he thinks, he has to get to the car, and hope that it starts. How could he not have guessed that Charles - Dr Xavier - _the Chesapeake Ripper_ \- had gotten to it somehow? But of course that was what the man was like. He’s putting all the pieces together now and it’s too little too late, even as he reels, as he becomes aware of the _extent_ of the doctor’s machinations. They’d all been little more than putty in his hands, after all; they’d all danced on his strings. 

If humans could be such easy prey for the doctor, then surely the puzzle of a machine - complicated or not - would have been as nothing.

Erik remembers taking off from the crime scene, he remembers foolishly leaving everyone else behind. What he wouldn’t give now for Katz to come bursting in, like the cavalry, like his kind of cavalry - she’d never judge him, nor would he ever do the same to her. And she’d understand why he had to check on the others - he thinks that maybe he would have shared his instinctive drive, that she would have helped him. One of them to check on Abigail Hobbs, the other to do the same for Alana Bloom.

Now he closes his eyes, and his next breath comes out as a sob. He hopes that the paramedics get to Alana in time. He thinks of her forearms slashed open - classic self-defense wounds - and he thinks of her pale face, the naked fear that shook her voice apart as she sent him in Abigail’s direction.

Another sob. He bites down savagely on the inside of his cheek. Abigail - he’s torn between wanting her to live and wanting her to die. She’s already carrying such terrible things inside her head, that it seems cruel to add these newest torments to the list. It had only taken Erik one look to determine what she’d been about to do, when he found her. There was a girl at her feet who could have been her twin sister, fallen and weeping - her face cut around the edges and partly peeled down from her forehead. 

Abigail had been holding that bloodied knife to her own cheek, smiling, blank-eyed. There’s no doubt in Erik’s mind that she had been about to start performing that same grisly excision on herself.

The details surface and resurface, tormenting him: Abigail laughing while the tears streaked down her cheeks. She’d been missing her scarf, and the scar on her throat seemed to yawn open, all but spilling out blood to echo what was already splashed onto her fingers, her wrists. The sickly-sweet smell of whatever mind-altering substance had been introduced into her system, as well as into that of her victim.

Erik knows who could have warped her this way, and knows all too well that Dr Xavier would have had ample enough time to exert his influence upon her. They’d become friends, in a way, Abigail and the doctor, and she’d seemed to look up to him - a sort of inevitable result, Erik thinks. Certainly all of them have fallen under the doctor’s spell.

As if on cue, the man speaks, and the words make Erik freeze in mid-step.

“Really, Erik, after all this time spent convincing you that we’re friends,” Dr Xavier says, and Erik grits his teeth. In the man’s mind he must just sound like he’s delivering a mild scolding. What Erik hears is something different, something more terrifying: a monotone, dissociated, detached. “Didn’t I make a point out of telling you that you’re not alone? Didn’t I help you with your work? I won’t be best pleased, not if this is how you’re going to be returning the favor.”

Erik keeps silent. He wishes he could run. His mind is starting to play tricks on him, because off in the distance he can hear the wail of police sirens. They won’t make it. He needs them to be here now, and they are not here _right now_. Abigail and the other girl need to be looked after.

As for himself, he doesn’t really know.

Getting out of this one alive means he can put the Chesapeake Ripper behind bars.

His mind clicks through the impossibilities of that scenario. He’s not at his best - he’s been worn down and ground into the dust, left unmoored. His body is already protesting the grind he’s been putting it through. Alcohol, caffeine, sleepwalking. Long restless hours of looking at and thinking about terrible things. Stress and worry and rage and the many unsavory effects of whatever it is his mind makes him do, to understand how people act when they’ve been loosed from conventional definitions of morality and sanity and _right_.

If he looks over his shoulder, he thinks he might see the knife in the doctor’s hand.

Erik hasn’t had cause to pray in the terrifying long years of his work in homicide and then in the FBI, and he wishes he could remember how, here, at the point where he knows he’s running a futile race against his death. A death that wears blue eyes and a deceptively kind smile.

And in a way, he’s not surprised when he turns around and all but falls down at Dr Xavier’s feet.

That same frightening smile: it is only benign on the surface.

Erik has missed everything, all of the clues, and now he knows he’s going to pay for this blindness with his life.

This is the cost of wanting a friend, he thinks - or at least someone who could have tried to understand him the way no one has ever managed. Alana tried, and ultimately shied at the last fence. Jack has never had any idea of what he was really going through. On Katz he would have ultimately become an imposition.

Light shatters off the blade that the doctor hefts in one hand, almost casually.

Erik looks away, looks down, and closes his eyes, and the first strike makes him scream. The pain is harrowing and immediate.

In the darkest corners of his mind, the wolves begin to howl, long eerie notes in emptiness.

He smells smoke and dinner, a roast of some kind, and he remembers that he’s been fed the meat of people - he’s just one name on a list, so many guests, so many meals. 

People are fodder, Erik thinks, almost giddy now _in extremis_ , fodder for their own kind who exploit them and manipulate them and deceive them - and people even oppress themselves. There is such a thing as self-deception. He wanted to believe in Dr Xavier, and so he did, and what did that get him?

A knife to the face.

In the last split-second before he loses consciousness, Erik feels a breathless, wretched relief: freedom at last, perhaps, the freedom and nothingness of oblivious death.

*

It’s not as easy as that.

His senses report back in, reluctantly, in disparate flashes. He catches a glimpse of Jack Crawford, worried, and in harsh overhead light looking old and broken-down.

He thinks he hears Katz yelling angrily at him to stay with them.

He squeezes, weakly, at a hand that is small and cold and sturdy, that must belong to Alana.

A fourth presence, shivering, not alone, that something deep in his mind connects to Abigail.

Erik is alive and he knows he’s alive, and this is not the outcome he’d prepared for.

Eventually he’ll learn that there are no reflective surfaces around him, and perhaps he’ll understand why.

Eventually he’ll learn about Dr Xavier’s fate, about the cage that’s been constructed to keep him away from all other living souls.

Eventually he’ll get up and walk away from the tethers of the hospital, from the IV drip taped into the back of his hand. Maybe he’ll even walk away from the Bureau. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to decide.

For now, Erik exists, breath by labored breath, and the fear never leaves him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who's stuck with me through this extremely self-indulgent fusion, and to everyone who's been so kind as to comment and tell me that this was creepy or good or terrifying - many, many, _many_ thanks. I'd raise a glass to all of you, and seat you all at a long table for a good meal, if only I could. 
> 
> I'm posting this on 6 June 2013: it's been two years since I joined the XMFC fandom. You are all amazing people. I'm glad to have met so many of you.


End file.
